Kristin Hersh on 30 Years of Throwing Muses

The seminal rock band gets older but not soft

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The Throwing Muses are back with their first album in 10 years, Purgatory/Paradise. The alt-rock pioneers began in high school in Newport, Rhode Island, in the early '80s and became the first American band to be signed to label 4AD. Fronted by singer/guitarist Kristin Hersh and her step-sister, Tanya Donnelly, along with drummer Dave Narcizo, the band weathered lineup changes over the years while enjoying success at college radio. Hersh explored side projects and solo excursions and has since reformed the band with Narcizo and longtime bassist Bernard Georges.

The new release is available in multiple formats, both digitally and as a CD and physically as an art book with a CD insert by Harper Collins on their imprint It Books. We talked to Hersh about the new album, new ways of making and marketing music, what Throwing Muses has planned for 2014, and being a mother on the road. She also likes to swear a lot.

ESQUIRE.COM: Hey, Kristin...

KRISTIN HERSH: Okay, just to let you know, I'm going to be out in a field while we're talking so if it gets goofy and you hear cows or geese or if the wind is louder than me, let me know and I'll go duck behind something.

KH: It is, but I'm not in Los Angeles. No, there's hay bales here. I'm in New England. I spend half my time in New England and half in New Orleans, but when I got my phone we lived in L.A. I'm in Rhode Island, in a little farmhouse near my studio, in a nature preserve out here.

ESQ: Are you... on Aquidneck Island?

KH: Oh, are you the guy that knows us?

ESQ: Yeah. You wouldn't know me, but I was two years behind you in high school, at Rogers. I saw the show you did there in '84, and my mother taught at Salve Regina College with your father. There are concentric circles of friends and I thought it would be nice to talk to you.

KH: No way! That is so rad! And if you grew up in Newport around that time, you probably say rad, too! [Laughs]

ESQ: I do indeed say rad.

KH: That is so cool. How're you doing?

ESQ:Good, thanks. So are you up in Newport, or the area now?

KH: In the area. Although New Orleans is our city in the winter, which is also nice.

ESQ:I've heard great things about it.

KH: New Orleans is booming, maybe a little too much. It's the best place to start a business in America. At least it's putting them on the map and putting some money in the coffers again. The library is a little weird: You get the sense that all the books were donated after Katrina. There's a Hemingway section, but it's not any Hemingways you've ever heard of. Shit like that. There's still a half-ass, Third World thing going on, but I love that because it's just a different country over there. It's pretty amazing, even if you go off-season when it's beastly, but it's supposed to be beastly because it's New Orleans. It's swampy and it's thick and you drink yourself silly and that's what's supposed to happen there.

ESQ:I can't wait. So let's talk about the new album. The Muses have been around for how long now?

KH: We started playing out at The Living Room and Lupo's [in Rhode Island] when we were about 14 years old, 1980 or '81. We were mostly girls and they said, "Girls don't start fights." So it didn't matter that we were underage. But of course we were underage for about seven years. We had records out before we were old enough to be allowed in the clubs.

ESQ:But you got out there.

KH: We played in clubs and made demos. I just made myself a pain in the ass with bookers. I'd see that the Violent Femmes were coming, and I'd call up and say, "You're going to need an opening band. You know it's gotta be us!" Eventually they'd just go, "Okay..."

ESQ: So you opened for the Violent Femmes when you were teenagers?

KH: We got to play with Violent Femmes, R.E.M., Meat Puppets, Volcano Suns... Yeah, it was awesome. And it didn't occur to them to say no. When we headlined it was sadder, though. Our first show at The Living Room, they gave people money to come.

ESQ: Really?

KH: Yeah. Instead of charging people money, they gave you a dollar to come. Because then you'd go drink to forget the sound of the horrible band, I guess. [Laughs] Our favorite thing is when stuff is funny and sad. So we enjoyed it. We took pictures.

ESQ: Things have changed a lot since then. Now most clubs make you bring X amount of people before they'll pay you.

KH: There's not much of a live culture anywhere any longer. It's just the crap pop that is still touring that's making any money. We always considered touring as a promotional venture. Now that it's common knowledge that there's no such thing as record sales or CD sales, they say, "Well, you're going to have to get off your ass and go out on the road and make some money!" And touring has never made any money and ticket sales are down as much as music sales. It's not a viable venture anymore and that's exactly what should have happened before we invented the idea of rock stars. The day the Carter Family decided to drive around collecting folk songs and putting their name on it and demanding money when anybody played it, that was the beginning of the fall of music. Something that is a spontaneous human venture, and you attach a dollar sign to it — other than passing the hat — it goes down the shitter.

ESQ: When you put it like that, it's so depressing.

KH: Except now it's coming back because the beast has fallen on its face and we're dancing on its grave.

ESQ: Are you planning to mount a tour for the new album after the holidays?

KH: Yeah, we should be on tour now, but our bass player hurt his hand pretty badly, so we moved the dates to early 2014.

ESQ: That's not so bad. You get some extra time over the holidays.

KH: Yeah. We usually begin overseas in Australia and then do America, because America is so slow — it takes them a long time to catch up to anything.

ESQ: Is next year significant to you? It will be 30 years since you released your first EP.

KH: Uh... I don't know. I think I released Hips and Makers [Hersh's solo debut album] twenty years ago, but most people don't care about that. [Laughs]

KH: We've continued working because making music has nothing to do with the music business. We play together and record and tour, but we figured that in an industry that asks you to dumb down your product, you're morally bound to not participate. So we didn't. Now that we're listener-supported, we can release our product to people who have no ear to the marketability of said product. In fact if we gave them anything that was marketable, I think they'd reject it and stop supporting us.

KH: Yeah. I started that with some friends about seven or eight years ago. I wrote an essay called "Art vs. Commerce" with an eye toward making the listeners the record company. A circle of gratitude, where they pay my recording costs and they'd be getting the music for nothing, and it's been successful enough to make three solo records, all the 50 Foot Wave records and this epic Throwing Muses release. There's still a struggle — it's like making a movie every time because you have to raise money for the basics, raise money for the overdubs, raise money for the mixing and the mastering and then the publicity. But it's an honest venture of passing the hat, like I said. It means that the work itself can be realized. Not only can we take five years to make a record; we can release five records a year if we want.

ESQ: So what do you think about these people doing the Kickstarter campaigns and things like that? The woman from Dresden Dolls, Amanda Palmer...

KH: Eh. Yeah... I know what you mean. It would be nice if people didn't suck. That's all. You know? Even if you're not going to play for anybody, you shouldn't suck, otherwise what the fk are you doing it for? I guess money? Ego? And you know that's gonna send you to hell, so... I think people should quit sucking.

ESQ: Well said. Let's talk about the album a bit. I think I know the answer, but what inspired the title, Purgatory/Paradise?

KH: Our last record was called Limbo and there's a street sign at a local beach — you know where the sign is?

ESQ: Sure. [Sachuest, or "Second" Beach, is a beach at the bottom of Purgatory Road, where it meets Paradise Avenue in Middletown, R.I.]

KH: That's where we go to recuperate after killing ourselves in the studio. You lie in the sand any time of the year and get salt in your hair when the wind blows and you can work again. The fact that we can leave the purgatory of the studio and find the paradise of the beach is significant for us.

ESQ:So what brought about the idea for... I don't even know what to call it: the release?

KH: I know! [Laughs] It's a record release but a book is published, so I don't know what to call it.

ESQ:A unique format, perhaps? Is that how you would you like to describe that?

KH: Uh... Well, I don't know. I just told you I don't know! [Laughs] Well, I released my last solo record as a book, called Crooked, and it was more like glorified liner notes, to be honest. It worked in as much as I didn't want music to be reduced to a piece of plastic that nobody gives a shit about. This time, we spent about four years in the studio and did a lot of erasing. You're faced with the granite in front of you and you're tasked with the mission of bringing about its sculpture. Not to be overly pretentious, but I really don't give a shit anymore. In fact, our pet name for Purgatory/Paradise is Precious/Pretentious. [Laughs]

ESQ:Rad. I love it.

KH: We are so obsessed with what we do and now we're so old, we've stopped apologizing for it.

ESQ:Old? Wait a minute. You aren't that old, dammit!

KH: [Laughs] Well, we still look okay, but we're very tired! Anyway... What happens is that when you're exploring all your sonic options, you take chances that may not only alienate people, but trap your record in time. And that's what you have to be careful about, because what you end up with is an adorned skeleton. That's all. You're looking for the bones and the viscera and a little bit of ear candy and not much else. That leaves a lot of holes and I like holes in music because I speak that language fluently and it's the only language I speak fluently. My English is a little bit... Music is what I do speak and I realize that I've confused a lot of people who are not fluent in that language over the years.

ESQ: You've written books...

KH: Well, to write a book like Rat Girl and do all these readings and just talk to people and they know immediately what you're talking about... So to help people along with all these holes we left, Dave [Narcizo] presented his expertise, which is visuals, colors, and textures which reflect the concurrent themes of the songs. I had to do the same thing with essays and it was a fluid process. It was not work. It was very obvious what needed to be done to honor this material. I love telling these stories, most of which are very funny. Some are sad and some are prose poetry that is what happens when you sit in the the atmosphere of a song and you can't think of something else to say. A song has usually said its piece, so how do you help somebody along with that? That's what these do, they just help you along.

ESQ: There are 32 songs on the album, though some tracks are not very long. That would still qualify as a double album, wouldn't it?

KH: I don't know. I don't think we did vinyl for that reason. We just did CDs because they all fit on one CD. I mean, everything was intentional because we had fkin' five years to do it. I recorded my parts first so we would end up with a human feel which you can't really fake by putting drums on first or using any kind of a click track. So you get this nice kind of swimmy, Velvet Underground fluid timing, which is actually another production approach that we had to work on to sound fluid instead of forced. Probably the most important production aspect is the fluid timing of it. It makes it sound fragile, but with balls.

KH: Yeah, the single is "Sunray Venus." But all that means is that if we do a session at the BBC and they say, "What should we play?" we say that. But it's not like it's being worked by a radio person or anything like that.

KH: Oh, yeah? I tried to make that a solo song, but it sounded so stupid. Dave was just like, "That's because it's mine, give it to me!" Dave always knows best. That was actually mentioned for a single, too. You have a good ear.

ESQ: Good ear and crazy ideas. I was thinking that since the Pixies are going on tour next year that maybe you'll get to together, because they started out pretty much opening for you. Any chance you'll get together?

KH: Yeah, but our shows are different from theirs. We play very intricate music in theaters and they've moved on to bigger places where we'd have to be more simple. We need absolute artistic control. We're precious and pretentious! Don't forget! [Laughs]

ESQ: So what's the ideal venue for the Muses?

KH: Lots of places, but they can't be too big. The idea was always to turn them into a church. They can be scuzzy, that works. You can't lose control of your audience because we feel that music happens between the musician and the listener and isn't played by the musician at the listener, you know what I mean? I lose myself completely when I'm playing and I think if there were any distractions I wouldn't be able to do that. No backward baseball caps and no arenas. Anything in between I think we could probably handle.

ESQ: What is your take on people filming or taking pictures with cell phones at shows? Do you see that as invasive or, ultimately, as a form of promotion?

KH: Oh, I don't care. YouTube has been a little disconcerting. We'll tell stories about a fked-up TV show we did in England ten years ago and maybe we tell that story so many times it starts to become mythology. Then someone will send us a link to it and we'll have to acknowledge, "Oh... It happened." But I certainly let people record, I've always let people record. That's an honor, I think, and they can share it or do whatever they want with it. Especially with 50 Foot Wave.

ESQ: Is 50 Foot Wave still active?

KH: We have a finished record ready to go as soon as the Muses hullabaloo is over.

ESQ: The Muses hullabaloo is going through 2014, isn't it?

KH: I don't know if that counts as hullabaloo! [Laughs]

ESQ: What's it like being a mother and such an active musician? Is it a boon, a distraction?

KH: I don't know. I've been a mother as long as I've been making records. I had my baby when I was a teenager, and then I had three more babies. Every five years I've had another baby, and so I don't know much else but having a kid. Does it impact what I do? Yes, I suppose, because I had to give up sleeping. [Laughs] I know a lot of other people who do sleep, but it never bothered me. Even with 50 Foot Wave, because of our sound, they would often have us play at one o'clock in the morning. When you're loud, you play late. So loud-out would be at three or four and everybody would go to bed and my baby would get up at six. And three months into it I would think, "I'm going to die." But I would also think, "I'm going to die happy."

ESQ:Aww... That's very sweet.

KH: It is. I'm very lucky. When you're on the road, you live in squalor and what you want is something as wholesome as a child, and the way a child alters an environment, my bandmates are their uncles, the club people give them comic books and raisins. Guys who look like Hell's Angels will cuddle them on their laps. They may not know it yet, but they've had a wonderful childhood.